Thursday, April 12, 2012

Openismus gave me the opportunity to check how good or bad Maliit works together with Plasma Active. As I've never installed Maliit nor Plasma Active until now I expected some pitfalls, but in the end I got both of them running on a WeTab tablet:

Most Planet KDE readers are of course familiar with Plasma Active, but what is Maliit?

Maliit

Providing a virtual keyboard seems to be straight forward in the first sight, but it is very challenging if things like predictive input, error-correction, cut/copy/paste, multitouch, context-sensitivity or languages like Chinese and Arabic should be supported.

Current State

The combination of Plasma Active and Maliit works together better than I expected initially: Focusing an input field automatically pops up the Maliit keyboard and entering a key results in showing the output without delay on the WeTab tablet. This sounds self-evident, but the performance is very critical for a virtual keyboard: Even a minor delay after touching the device gets noticed by users - the acceptable delay seems to be a lot lower than the usual "keep it below 300 ms and it will be perceived as fast" user interface objective.

At the moment there are at least two open issues that need to get fixed in Maliit:

When entering a key the 'key magnifiers' (= the orange 't' in the first screenshot) don't disappear. The issue is tracked on the Maliit bug tracker and investigations are ongoing.

Currently Maliit requires compositing for providing the virtual keyboard as overlay.

Installation

I've installed Plasma Active and Maliit from the sources on the master-branch to be sure being on track with the latest state of both frameworks. For Plasma Active the installation guide and the development guide are sufficient for building Plasma Active. I've added a few notes to the Maliit on Plasma wiki to document the approach I've taken.

The progress of integrating Maliit into Plasma Active is tracked at https://bugs.maliit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51 - I cannot judge the final outcome of this, but I think from a technical point of view it is a benefit for both frameworks if they are interacting well. Whether Maliit might be a candidate for being the default input method for Plasma Active also involves some non-technical topics like the general maintenance of Maliit and whether there are enough resources to make the integration with Plasma Active really perfect. We'll see :-)